Behavioral Health Blog

Our struggle with controlling our behavior has a long history. The first recorded diet long pre-dated Jenny Craig or Weight Watchers; when God told Adam and Eve to avoid eating from the Tree of Knowledge, their freedom to make their own dinner plans was indeed somewhat ...

Are diets on their way out? Surveys done over the past twenty years suggest that’s the case. The NPD Group, which monitors trends in eating, reported in 2012 that only 20 percent of adults surveyed said they were on a diet, down from a peak of ...

In an earlier post I talked about how our innate sense of fair play can make the experience of dieting feel unjust. But what does justice or fairness, which involves preventing or resolving conflict between an individual and others, have to do with an individual’s own internal conflict ...

In an earlier post I talked about how our innate sense of fair play can make the experience of dieting feel unjust. But what does justice or fairness, which involves preventing or resolving conflict between an individual and others, have to do with an individual’s own ...

In an earlier post I talked about how our innate sense of fair play can make the experience of dieting feel unjust. But what does justice or fairness, which involves preventing or resolving conflict between an individual and others, have to do with an individual’s own ...

This has been a terrible winter by any measure, but one of the most frightening and dangerous effects has been on highway travel. Snowstorms have caused several multi-vehicle pileups, some fatal. The worst one (so far; it’s only February) happened in Wisconsin where most reports counted ...

There is a concept in psychology and behavioral economics known as the scarcity heuristic. It simply means that when there is something that we want but are afraid we can’t have it, we want it even more. But scarcity affects more than how much we want ...

Recently, I was waiting in a long security line at the airport when a woman came from somewhere in the back and asked those of us near the front if we would allow her to go through. She explained that she was there to meet a ...

When we rely on the collective wisdom of diet “experts” we question the kind of sensible decision-making process that has guided human food consumption forever. Our common sense ideas about eating have been replaced with the notion that in order to eat in a healthy way, ...